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“All in due time,” Daji said calmly. “But first, another matter to attend to.”
And she looked directly into the shadows where Tyr stood. “Good. You’re here.”
Tyr took that for his signal.
Knives raised, he rushed from the shadows—only to stumble to his knees as Daji arrested him with her gaze.
He choked, unable to speak. His limbs were numb, frozen; it was all he could do to remain upright. Daji had the power of hypnosis, he knew, but never had she used it on him.
All thoughts were pushed from his mind. All he could think about were her eyes. They were at first large, luminous and black; and then they were yellow like a snake’s, with narrow pupils that drew him in like a mother grasping at her baby, like a cruel imitation of his own goddess.
And like his goddess, she was so beautiful. So very beautiful.
Transfixed, Tyr lowered his knives.
Visions danced before him. Her great yellow eyes pulsed in his gaze; suddenly gigantic, they filled his entire field of sight to the periphery, drew him into her world.
He saw shapes without names. He saw colors beyond description. He saw faceless women dancing through vermilion and cobalt, bodies curved like the silk ribbons they spun in their hands. Then, as her prey was entranced, the Vipress slammed down into him with her fangs and flooded him with poison.
The psychospiritual assault was devastating and immediate.
She shattered Tyr’s world like glass, like he existed in a mirror and she had dashed it against a sharp corner, and he was arrested in the moment of breaking so that it was not over in seconds but took place over eons. Somewhere a shriek began and grew higher and higher in pitch, and did not stop. The Vipress’s eyes turned a colorless white that bored into his vision and turned everything into pain. Tyr sought refuge in the shadows, but his goddess was nowhere, and those hypnotic eyes were everywhere. Everywhere he turned, the eyes looked upon him; the great Snake hissed, her gaze trained on him, boring into him, paralyzing him—
Tyr called out for his goddess again, but still she was silent, she had been driven away by a power that was infinitely stronger than darkness itself.
Su Daji had channeled something older than the Empire. Something as old as time.
Tyr’s world ceased to spin. He and the Empress drifted alone together in the eye of the hurricane of colors, stabilized only by her generosity. He took a form again, and so did she; no longer a viper but a goddess in the shape of Su Daji, the woman.
“Do not resent me for this. There are forces at play you could not possibly understand, against which your life is irrelevant.” Although she appeared mortal, her voice came from everywhere, originated within him, vibrated in his bones. It was the only thing that existed, until she relented and let him speak.
“Why are you doing this?” Tyr whispered.
“Prey do not question the motives of the predator,” hissed the thing that was not Su Daji. “The dead do not question the living. Mortals do not challenge the gods.”
“I killed for you,” Tyr said. “I would have done anything for you.”
“I know,” she said, and stroked his face. She spoke with a casual sorrow, and for an instant she sounded like the Empress again. The colors dimmed. “You were fools.”
She pushed him off the ship.
The pain of drowning, Tyr realized, came in the struggle. But he could not struggle. He was every part of him paralyzed, unable to blink even to shut his eyes against the stinging assault of salt water.
Tyr could do nothing then but die.
He sank back into the darkness. Back into the deep, where sounds could not be heard, sights could not be seen, where nothing could be felt, where nothing lived.
Back into the soft stillness of the womb.
Back to his mother. Back to his goddess.
The death of a shaman did not go unnoticed in the world of spirit. The shattering of Tyr sent a psychospiritual shock wave across the realm of things unknown.
It was felt far away in the peaks of the Wudang Mountains, where the Night Castle stood hidden from the world. It was felt by the Seer of the Bizarre Children, the lost son of the last true khan of the Hinterlands.
The pale Seer traversed the spirit plane as easily as passing through a door, and when he looked for his commander he saw only darkness and the shattered outline of what had once been human. He saw, on the horizon of things yet to come, a land covered in smoke and fire. He saw a battalion of ships crossing the narrow strait. He saw the beginning of a war.
“What do you see?” asked Altan Trengsin.
The white-haired Seer tilted his head to the sky, exposing long, jagged scars running down the sides of his pale neck. He uttered a harsh, cackling laugh.
“He’s gone,” he said. “He’s really gone.”
Altan’s fingers tightened on the Seer’s shoulder.
The Seer’s eyes flew open. Behind thin eyelids there was nothing but white. No pupils, no irises, no spot of color. Only a pale mountain landscape, like freshly fallen snow, like nothingness itself. “There has been a Hexagram.”
“Tell me,” Altan said.
The Seer turned to face him. “I see the truth of three things. One: we stand on the verge of war.”
“This we’ve known,” Altan said, but the Seer cut him off.
“Two: we have an enemy whom we love.”
Altan stiffened.
“Three: Tyr is lost.”
Altan swallowed hard. “What does that mean?”
The Seer took his hand. Brought it to his lips and kissed it.
“I have seen the end of things,” he said. “The shape of the world has changed. The gods now walk in men as they have not for a long, long time. Tyr will not return. The Bizarre Children answer to you now, and you alone.”
Altan exhaled slowly. He felt a tremendous sense of both grief and relief. He had no commander. No. He was the commander.
Tyr cannot stop me now, he thought.
Tyr’s death was felt by the Gatekeeper himself, who had lingered all these years, not quite dead but not quite alive, ensconced in the shell of a mortal but not mortal himself.
The Gatekeeper was broken and confused, and he had forgotten much of who he was, but one thing he would never forget was the stain of the Vipress’s venom.
The Gatekeeper felt her ancient power dissipate into the void that both separated them and brought them together. And he raised his head to the sky and knew that an enemy had returned.
It was felt by the young apprentice at Sinegard who meditated alone when her classmates slept. Who frowned at the disturbance she felt acutely but did not understand.
Who wondered, as she constantly did, what would happen if she disobeyed her master, swallowed the poppy seed, and traversed to commune again with the gods.
If she did more than commune. If she pulled one back down with her.
For although she was forbidden from calling the Phoenix, that did not stop the Phoenix from calling upon her.
Soon, whispered the Phoenix in her sleep. Soon you will call on me for my power, and when the time comes, you will not be able to resist. Soon you will ignore the warnings of the Woman and the Gatekeeper and fall into my fiery embrace.
I can make you great. I can make you a legend.
She tried to resist.
She tried to empty her mind, like Jiang had taught her; she tried to clear the anger and the fire from her head.
